Published in the early and mid-nineteenth century, respectively, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) each contain a slavery subtext: the eponymous country house Mansfield Park in Austen's novel, the site of protagonist Fanny Price's upbringing and development from the age of ten onwards, is owned by her aunt's husband, Sir Thomas Bertram, who also owns an estate in Antigua; the character of Heathcliff in Brontë's novel is brought to Wuthering Heights from the major slave port of Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw, and despite varied descriptions of his appearance is consistently racially Othered. Austen's and Brontë's novels are more oblique in their references to racial difference and empire than Thackeray's Vanity Fair and James's Portrait of a Lady, but they are products of empire nonetheless. If Austen only alludes briefly to Sir Thomas's ownership and experiences of the Antiguan estate, and Brontë never explicitly specifies Heathcliff 's racialised identity, the novels’ historical contexts of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century encompass Britain's involvement in the slave trade as well as significant ownership of slave-holding properties on the imperial periphery. Critical debates surrounding the nature of the Bertrams’ wealth and Austen's and/or her novel's position on it and the representation of Heathcliff have reached no real consensus.

Film adaptations of Mansfield Park, directed by Patricia Rozema (1999), and Wuthering Heights, directed by Andrea Arnold (2011), offer their own versions of these narratives’ implication in questions of empire and race, extrapolating from the novels’ gestures towards slavery and salvaging this context for their screen versions of these two novels. They thus intervene in critical discourse by visualising the filmmakers’ readings of these texts. Further, the construction of domestic spaces and their environs in both these films underscores issues of power as they reside in questions of hospitality in both narratives. Rozema's version of Mansfield Park carefully positions Fanny in relation to domestic spaces in order to articulate her relationship to power in ways that many critics of the novel have often failed to do in their political sloppiness where questions of gender and race are concerned.